Open Hardware/Modding: Arduino and ESP32
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Using smart home tech to care for your pets | Arduino Blog
Smart home technology has a ton of useful and fascinating use cases for humans, but what about our pets? For most of us, our furry friends are members of the family, and if we can make modifications to our home to help them, we do it.
The good news here is that there are tons of home automation tools that you can use to make life easier and more fun for your pets, and many of them can be done with just a handful of starting materials and basic knowledge.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the ways smart homes can benefit pets, and explore some projects from the Arduino community.
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LiLyGo T-SIMCAM ESP32-S3 camera development board supports optional 4G LTE connectivity - CNX Software
ESP32-S3 has been in the news recently and we just wrote about the Bee S3 and BPI-PicoW-S3 boards yesterday, but there’s more, and LilyGo T-SIMCAM ESP32-S3 is another interesting ESP32-S3 board with a 2MP camera as well as support for an optional 4G LTE module.
The board can make use of the AI capabilities from the ESP32-S3 microcontroller through the built-in camera and microphone and offers two options for power with 5V through a USB Type-C port, as well as a 2-pin JST connector for connecting a battery.
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Standalone Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect-controlled computer runs BASIC for IoT development | Arduino Blog
If you’re more than 30 years old, then there is a good chance that BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was the first programming language you used. Many early computers shipped with a BASIC interpreter in firmware, so it was the first thing users saw when they booted up their computer. While other languages are more useful for most tasks today, BASIC still has benefits. To take advantage of it, Stefan Lenz used a Nano RP2040 Connect to build a standalone computer that runs BASIC for Internet of Things applications.
The Raspberry Pi RP2040 is a powerful microcontroller that immediately became popular after it hit the market in January 2021. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect is one of the newest boards in the Arduino lineup and gives users access to the RP2040 within the friendly Arduino ecosystem. In addition the MCU, this board also contains a u-blox WiFi and Bluetooth® adapter, a six-axis IMU, a microphone, 16MB of flash memory, and even a CryptoAuthentication chip. The u-blox adapter was particularly useful for this project, since it enables IoT control over a wireless network.
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Count elevator passengers with the Nicla Vision and Edge Impulse | Arduino Blog
Modern elevators are powerful, but they still have a payload limit. Most will contain a plaque with the maximum number of passengers (a number based on their average weight with lots of room for error). But nobody has ever read the capacity limit when stepping into an elevator or worried about exceeding it. In reality, manufacturers build their elevators to a size that prevents an excessive number of passengers. But as a demonstration, Nekhil R. put together a tutorial that explains how to use the Edge Impulse ML platform with an Arduino Nicla Vision board to count elevator passengers.
The Nicla Vision is a new board built specifically for computer vision applications — especially those that incorporate machine learning. In its small footprint (less than a square inch), there is a powerful STM32H747AII6 microcontroller, a 2MP color camera, a six-axis IMU, a time of flight sensor, a microphone, WiFi and Bluetooth, and an onboard LiPo battery charger — and it’s officially supported by Edge Impulse, making it well suited for ML projects.